A large casino typically employs thousands of gaming locations that include non-machine games and machine games. Users of the games typically desire to place orders or reservations as they play, and they may desire to exchange messages with other users. Messaging systems used in casinos in the past have failed to provide such capability. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,429,361 (Raven et al., issued Jul. 4, 1995), describes a 12 character dot-matrix LED display 30 that can display messages to a player and a keypad that the player can use to send messages to a control unit. However, the system is not sufficiently interactive and flexible to allow users to efficiently place orders or reservations or to exchange messages.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,951,397 (Dickinson, issued Sep. 14, 1999) and U.S. Pat. No. 6,210,279 (Dickinson, issued Apr. 3, 2001) each discloses a touch screen used in a gaming machine. However, the touch screens are CRTs and are used for operation of the game. Such screens would be too large for effective use in a messaging system suitable for coupling to a gaming machine. U.S. Pat. No. 6,712,98 (Paulsen) also discloses a simple touch screen player tracking interface.
In relation to announcement of events such as jackpots, it has been known to announce over casino public address systems, jackpots which have been won by players. This is typically done for large jackpots. Announcement of jackpots is believed to instill good will and entice other players to also play in hopes that they, too, would hit a jackpot. It is also know for gaming machines to post jackpots such as progressive jackpots on large video displays. Players can see the jackpots they are playing for. When a jackpot is awarded players would know by the re-setting of the jackpot to the seed, starting amount. In other words, if a progressive jackpot is at $26,500 and has a starting value of $10,000, when the jackpot is awarded the display would show the jackpot dropping to $10,000. This would “announce” to players that the jackpot has been awarded.
A drawback with current and prior jackpot announcements is that it requires workers to recognize and announce the jackpots. Often, due to other duties, announcements are not made or are made well after the jackpot has been awarded. Another drawback is that the announcement, the trigger for the announcement and the target clients for the announcement cannot be easily configured. It would be desirable to be able to automate and configure the announcement triggers, audience and the announcement type. In this fashion certain celebration announcements can be configured and selected, different triggers can be defines and the audience—clients to receive the announcement can be targeted.